Hybrid Dialog

Attendance at classical lectures usually leads to rather poor learning success. A wide variety of studies show that while lectures are as effective as any other method for transmitting information, they are inferior in many other dimensions. Lectures are not as effective as discussion methods in promoting thought and they are ineffective at teaching behavioral skills and subject-related values as well as at awakening interest in a subject. Still ex-cathedra teaching is a favored way to cope with a high student-to-teacher ratio. To solve this conflict between organizational and pedagogical requirements, a group of researchers at the Institute of Teacher Education at the University of Zurich has developed a hybrid course setting using an online learning platform. Their setting incorporates a dialog among students within a large lecture class. Furthermore a feedback loop enables the lecturer to continuously adjust the content of the lecture to the learning process of the students. In this article, the authors first present the structure of this setting and then illustrate how to implement it by the web-based open source learning management system OLAT (Online Learning and Training). Based on their research, they focus on key components for the success of their hybrid dialog. They show how individual and group learning can be fostered with corresponding assignments, assessments, and assigned roles such as moderators. Thus, the authors will define their position that the challenge of a large lecture class can be met while successfully implementing social learning and process-oriented assessments of academic achievement.

Improving the Tracking of Student Participation and Effort in Online Learning

Much research into educational technology is focused on tools for supporting teaching and learning. In contrast to this work, relatively little research is conducted into technology that tracks student participation and effort. No matter how good the educational technology, learning is dependent on a sufficient input of effort from the student. Most Learning Management Systems have some tools for tracking students, but they are currently difficult to use and underused by instructors. This chapter examines the importance of tracking in student management, reviews attempts to improve the quality of tracking tools, and suggests paths for future research based on the deficiencies in current tools.

Open Synchronicity for Online Class Support

Instant messaging and text chat, online collaborative whiteboards, web conferencing and other synchronous Web 2.0 tools are increasingly finding their way into higher education and are available in both commercially-branded and open source varieties. This chapter describes best practices and challenges in using these new tools, focusing on free and open source software for synchronous course delivery, collaboration, learning activities, and technical support, based on the author’s experience in online teaching and online-teaching support. Synchronous tools can provide immediate and efficient communication for instructors, learners and support staff, fostering community and establishing a heightened sense of social presence. An increasing number of practitioners in the field of distance learning are using synchronous tools to reach their learning and support objectives (Murphy and Rodríguez Manzanares, 2008). Today, free and open-source tools offer similar functionality as costly enterprise systems. This chapter will describe these new open source tools, the types of needs that drive their use, and strategies for effective use and implementation

Integrating New Open Source Assessment Tools into dotLearn LMS

The convergence process initiated by the European Higher Education Space (EHES) has changed the approach to the teaching and learning process focusing largely on monitoring the progress of the student. This task can be simplified with the proper use of tools integrated in the universities’ Learning Management Systems (LMS). Most of these platforms have modules for managing the evaluation and to create online examinations. However, they do not tend to contemplate ways of evaluation depending on the subjects taught. This chapter presents a tool for continuous evaluation of a variety of subjects and their integration into a LMS based on open source. In the University of Valencia’s particular case, the LMS includes facilities to create online examinations, but it does not provide a user-friendly interface. To improve the usability of this module a computer program has been developed to simplify the evaluation process.

Leading Toward Improved Collaboration

As more and more learning is adapted to the Web 2.0 environment, it becomes imperative that faculty and students have the ability to collaborate through instant file sharing in a secure environment. Faculty, staff, and students of colleges and universities are more likely to click on or choose ‘File-Save’ than to file work in a physical filing cabinet today. Processing, managing, and storing these electronic files is much less structured than filing systems of the past. There is a critical need to manage the explosion of e-mail, documents, chat, and other content. Document creation to the ultimate disposition and storage of documents in both the function of teaching and learning, as well as the administrative functions within a university setting, requires process management that will provide a secure solution. The University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) chose to purchase a Xythos product branded as eDocs to the university community, which provided a basic content management solution. The ABACUS (central guiding priorities) method of critique was used to determine the best possible solution. In this chapter, the authors will discuss how the Xythos product was chosen and how this choice impacted the pedagogy of online learning at UIS.

Plagiarism Detection Tools in Learning Management Systems

The main objectives of this chapter are to review the state-of-the art in plagiarism detection methods, discuss the most popular software tools available on the market and describe the new open architecture for plagiarism detection tools. The proposed architecture emphasizes the extensibility feature that allows it to be easily adapted for handling new types of assignments in the future. This chapter shows how the proposed architecture was implemented in a desktop application and a server-side plug-in for the Moodle course management system. An extended set of user trials is provided to support the proposed solutions. This set includes extensive tests for intra-corpal and internet plagiarism searches, tests with non-English assignments and promising results on cross language plagiarism detection.

Technology Enhanced Distance Learning Utilising Sakai CLE and Adobe Connect Pro

On-line environments have been incorporated in the Distance learning programmes of the International Equine Institute (IEI) in order to address concerns about streamlining assessment turn-around, distance student attendance at tutorials, providing more detailed and quicker assignment feedback, student peer interaction, student to tutor1 interaction and, of course, student support. The overriding concern was to provide a more flexible, active learning environment to develop and enhance learning opportunities while, concurrently, integrating more closely the learning activities of the student with the University of Limerick (UL) community. The impetus, therefore, was to make studies convenient and attractive to the location of the distance student, while maintaining educational quality through the provision of pedagogical innovations and at the same time providing a social and interactive environment to support the distance student. In so doing, the IEI uses the collaborative learning environment (CLE) Sakai (www.Sakaiproject.org) to support the distance student and also utilises Adobe Connect Pro™ to deliver on-line synchronous desktop-to-desktop tutorials. This chapter outlines aspects drawn from our experiences with the on-line support and delivery of distance learning programmes. Throughout, various recommendations on enhancing the experiences for students are also presented.

Using a Learning Management System to Facilitate Learning Outcomes Assessment

Increased demands for accountability among state and federal policy makers require that colleges and universities improve the process of measuring student learning outcomes. Despite a growing need, there has been limited development of integrated, electronic processes and tools that facilitate assessment of student progress toward program-level learning outcomes. Collecting student course materials, classifying by program and course-level objectives and reporting the results remains a tedious and labor-intensive task. This project demonstrates how course-level assessment data from a learning management system (LMS) can be utilized for program-level outcomes assessment. A pilot system was developed to integrate data from a LMS to provide continuous reporting of program and course-level assessment with minimal additional effort from faculty and students. This chapter shares the authors’ outcomes assessment system development approach, faculty development approach, and the lessons learned from their project, including the challenges confronted during system implementation.

Choosing the Appropriate E-Learning System for a University

In this chapter the author discuss the introduction of an e-learning system to enhance teaching and learning at a university. The focus is on the decision process choosing a system. Abstract criteria and feature lists are not sufficient for choosing the right e-learning software, even if all stakeholders and their respective requirements are heard. The author argues that “soft” factors should be considered when evaluating e-learning software: (1) The age of the students and their level of education, (2) the pedagogical guidelines and the culture of teaching and learning of the university, and (3) the educational scenarios in lectures and seminars. These factors seem to be only small details and are typically neither mentioned in the requirements nor in the feature lists of e-learning software. Therefore the author proposes that institutions should evaluate prospective systems in real-world scenarios. As a case in point, the author will outline a number of significant differences between two e-learning systems with a focus on pedagogical aspects. The systems can be seen as representative for a certain class of systems; both offer all features that are commonly seen as the most relevant when making a decision for a university e-learning system.